2005-07-29

Fun with Hubjects

What happens when you are standing in the shower at oh-dark-thirty in the morning and you start thinking about hubjects? It goes like this.

A hubject is the result a phonetic accident when two memes, subject and hub, have a translocation error performed on them. This accident is part of what we now call directed evolution. By contrast, the philadelphia chromosome, known to be behind several cancers, the most prominent being chronic myelogenous leukemia, is a translocation error, not thought to be directed, between chromosomes 9 and 22. That error splices part of 9 with part of 22 into the famous BCR-ABL splice, characteristically referred to as "ph+" (because it was the first cancer gene discovered -- in Philadelphia -- following Watson&Crick). But, there remains the other parts which did not become famous, but which also get together. A dissertation at UCLA showed that object to be benign.

So, what's that got to do with hubjects? That's what hits when you've got soap in your eyes. In America, we have this whole thing about suburbs. Stay with me here; don't try to guess where this is going. We speak of living in the 'burbs. Could we say that a SubjectProxy (aka: Topic) living in a topic map is, um..., living in the 'bubs? Only if we had a different phonetic accident on the same memes and came up with, brace yourself, sububs.

You know, we can do that. Language is the longest running open source project in the entire universe. We can make up names for things till the cows come home, and beyond. At the core, however, the identity of the subject remains the same. Go figure.